Reply #2: I'm feeling old too ... [View All]

[RoyGBiv]

Your point about productivity is a good one, and I've seen the results of this personally.

One of the many things that happened at Cox my final year there was that we migrated to a new system for interacting with customer accounts. It was web based.

I complained mightily at the time, having some influence, but no one listened to anything I had to say. "The database is located on a central server already. What's the difference?" they asked, rhetorically as it turned out. They knew the difference. They just didn't believe it was a difference that mattered.

I didn't have *that* much influence.

The day we migrated, our productivity rate halved itself, then halved again, which they attributed entirely to the newness of the system, resistance to its use by us "old timers," and just working the kinks out. A year later, with ample time to learn the thing behind us and enough turnover that the "old timers" wouldn't have significantly impacted the equation, our productivity level hadn't come within 25% of what it had been prior to the change. (Productivity in this instance refers primarily to the rate at which we were able to manipulate customer accounts.) The whole damn system was simply slower. It data had to go through a brazillion filters to secure it before it got out into the wild so that the sensitive information was protected, and the system downtime due to network lag on Internet lines outside our own network combined to ensure it would never recover.

To put a real-world example on it, with the old system, I could start a new account from scratch and install and activated a phone line with two numbers and every option we had in about 5 minutes. On the new one, it took me at least 20 on roll-out and only improved to about 10 minutes at my best. The screens to do all this looked nearly the same, and supposedly the mouse-click method should have been quicker (it wasn't). Most of the delay involved all the lag when moving between screens. Imagine the difference between clicking between individual pages on DU and taking a book and flipping through all its pages with your thumb. That was the level of the difference in speed.

But they powers-that-be called it a success because it was cheaper, at least according to one set of budget figures.

Granted they no longer had to provide the depth of training that was needed to use the old system, which was an application installed on everyone's workstation that interacted with a central database via a closed network. That system was complicated and relied on keystrokes rather than mouse clicks. It looked like a DOS app would. (And you could use the mouse, but the keystroke method was much faster once you knew the codes and key combinations.) They no longer had to pay a per-station licensing fee. And, they no longer had to employ a number of people to provide direct technical support and maintain the database.

But, a new budget category was created that funded all the outsourced technical support, the calls to which increased roughly 300% over what was peak with the previous system. We had to employ a new systems security team that dealt only with that system, the members of which demanded far higher salaries than the tech support personnel who had serviced the previous system. Downtime was phenomenal, which I am certain resulted in lost sales. Employees were frustrated and stopped caring as much. It was a minor, but notable point in my decision to leave the company.

The college where I work now uses a web-based application as well for dealing with student records. It goes down regularly, or I should say the Internet connection goes down somewhere between us and the company's servers on a regular basis, sometimes involving our ISP, sometimes something else. (And we don't have the advantage we had at Cox of administering our own network structures.) During registration, this creates an absolute nightmare.

Oh, and both at Cox and where I am now, we have millions of dollars to spend to resolve these little problems and have "preferred" customer access and at least a direct line to our ISP's support structure where I am now.

What happens to the student who is trying to finish a paper at 3am when the network goes down?